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Game Night vs. The Party

The Party is a fatuous attempt at serious humor, largely recycling political tropes and relationship disorders. It depicts the company of philosophically distinct personalities (e.g. the guru, the realist, the politician, the banker, the mother) joining in the celebration of political victory, finding themseles in the midst of tragedies being rolled out into a climactic finale.

The film is incomparable with the great dinner-scene dramas like Rules of the Game, The Exterminating Angel, or, more recently, Carnage. Perhaps if the film was longer and directed in the vein of Old Hollywood (e.g. Howard Hawk or Billy Wilder) with more rapid escalation and witty banter would Sally Porter have had a serious film-commentary on the English political dynamics. Instead, what we have, is one of those art films that feels like an eleventh hour completion credit that begets a little humor, a little wisdom, a little brilliance, but in the end, a remarkable cast of actors giving birth to a three-fold disappointment.

RATING: C

Game Night is a lesson in self- sobatage: clocking in just over 90-minutes, the film is a classic example of a one-trick pony with a script that runs out of clever cultural references just in time to euthanize itself. While a promising start, the writing is largely dependent on the actors established line of credit for comedy and as the film continues the action becomes the vehicle for mindless entertainment that leave largely any effort for serious moviemaking behind. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are a fine duo, but with a script from Mark Perez deserving of the associative credit with Accepted and Herbie Fully Loaded, it yields none of the talents of competent comedians and runs in desperation to rudimentary action based sequences and cheeky romance dynamics with superficial emotions that manifest in grotesque predictability. Aside from that handsome pooch and a few choice scenes with Jesse Plemons, the film aspires to little else than amusement for amusement sake.